The Conservatives could not possibly have made it more obvious that
they were itching for a week’s worth of headlines about the NDP’s
environmental policy. They could not be happier that the NDP has obliged
them. Eventually the NDP will figure all of this out.

On Sept. 2, Ottawa newsrooms received copies of “a memo
from Conservative campaign manager Jenni Byrne to the Conservative
caucus.” I put that last bit in quotation marks because Byrne, like her
predecessor Doug Finley, doesn’t ever “write to the caucus” unless she
wants to see what she writes appear in the newspapers. Leaking a “secret
memo” is cheaper than buying ad space and guarantees better play.

Byrne’s message to Canadians was that it was “important to ensure
Canadian middle-class families understand the threat posed by Thomas
Mulcair’s risky and dangerous economic plan.”

Byrne’s memo was about nothing else besides the Conservative claim
that Mulcair wants a carbon tax. (He doesn’t. I’ll get back to that in a
minute.)

Now, Mulcair is a clever fellow, so for a few days he didn’t say
anything about his environmental policy at all. So three days after
Byrne’s memo, Ottawa reporters received a paragraph of quotes from Natural Resources Minister
Joe Oliver about, well, guess what. “The NDP’s carbon tax is a direct
attack on the jobs of almost one million Canadians,” Oliver was said to
have said, “and we simply cannot afford it.”

Still Mulcair kept his cool. So on Sept. 6 it was Finance Minister
Jim Flaherty spamming the press gallery with warnings about “the
dangerous economic schemes and the higher taxes proposed by Thomas
Mulcair.”

Still Mulcair didn’t bite. If there’s one sure way to keep the
government on the defensive, it’s to make sure it’s the government
that’s defending, not the Opposition. On Sept. 16 on the Global TV show The West Block,
Tom Clark asked Mulcair the NDP’s priority for the fall. “The economy,”
the NDP leader said. “Jobs.” And he did talk about that, right up until
Clark asked him about this carbon tax business.

“You know, that is an ethical issue that Stephen Harper is going to
have to deal with,” Mulcair said, “because he knows his MPs are lying
when they say that.” If Harper has “an ounce of ethics,” he’ll call off
his MPs, Mulcair said.

There is something to this. Quite a lot, in fact. Mulcair prefers a
cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. There is much debate over
whether that would be better than a tax, but it is not a tax. Well, it
does cost businesses that emit a lot of atmospheric carbon money, and
the money, in most models, goes to the government. But it’s not a tax.
Mulcair and the rest of the NDP opposed Stéphane Dion’s Liberal
carbon-tax proposal in the 2008 election campaign, as indeed Dion
opposed Michael Ignatieff’s carbon-tax plan during the 2006 Liberal
leadership.

Why oppose a carbon tax? “We thought it hurt families in many regards and that it was regressive,” Mulcair told his interviewer.

It is also true, as Mulcair was eager to point out, that Harper’s
Conservatives proposed a cap-and-trade scheme that more closely
resembled the NDP’s plan than the Liberals’ in 2008. And reporters
hurried to add that Jim Prentice, when he was Harper’s environment
minister, tabled draft papers in 2009 aimed at “establishing a price for
carbon in Canada—something that has never been done before in this
country.”

“Lying” is, in fact, a good word for what the Conservatives have done
on this file. So the government apologized and said it had been
dishonest about its opponents. Just kidding! No, the government kept
piling on. On Tuesday they even put out a press release quoting Mulcair
to the extent that carbon taxes are regressive and saying that, “by his
own admission,” Mulcair was backing a regressive tax, when in fact—in
the world of truth— Mulcair had been explaining why he opposed a carbon
tax.

In favour of a cap-and-trade system.

Which would increase producers’ costs while augmenting government revenues.

Perhaps by now you see what’s going on.

The Conservatives’ only goal this autumn was to mire the NDP, who
have been having altogether too good a year, in quicksand up to their
waists. It is now clear that Harper promised cap-and-trade, which feels a
lot like a tax, in 2008 and didn’t mean it. And that Mulcair now
promises cap-and-trade and means it. MPs spent the week debating the
cost of an NDP government, not its benefits, not the cost of Harper’s.

It would be excellent if the government would be more honest. But
Jean Chrétien promised to scrap the GST, Paul Martin was for loyalty to
party leaders, Dion said a coalition with the NDP was not for him.
Voters tend to take claims of higher integrity at a heavy discount.